Here, There, and Everywhere: Inside the Mind of a Yalie
Warning: Spoilers ahead for War and Peace.
You’d think a book called War and Peace would take itself seriously. It’s more than a thousand pages long, and you’ve got Napoleon, a war that eats half of Europe, and Russian aristocratic families full of obnoxious but interesting people. Tolstoy still takes the piss every chance he gets. A man drinks a bottle of rum on a third-floor window ledge for a bet. Pierre, the book’s lovable disaster of an heir, and his friends tie a policeman to a bear and throw them both in a canal. At Borodino, Pierre wanders onto the battlefield in a white hat and a green tailcoat, getting in everyone’s way. People complain about parties. People complain about their fortunes. Everyone makes melodrama.
I read it for Professor John Lewis Gaddis’ first-year seminar, “What History Teaches,” and I couldn’t tell you much about the battle plan for Austerlitz. I can, however, tell you that Kutuzov, the Russian commander-in-chief, fell asleep while it was being read out. I remember Natasha fixing her cousin’s ribbon before her first grand ball and her brother Nikolai telling his friends a version of his first battle with a lot more bravery in it than the battle had.
Half the time it feels like Tolstoy is taking the piss out of you, too. You’re following a war that decides the fate of Europe, and suddenly he’s telling you about Kutuzov’s French romance novel. At Austerlitz, he even checks in with the Tsar’s horse, which hears the gunfire but has no idea what any of it means. You feel like you’re losing the plot. Then you realize the digressions are the plot. The details put you in the room, in the heads and in the hearts of these people. There is humanity and philosophy in his war, and there are vendettas and strategies in his peace. The war and the peace are the frame. What stays with you are the small moments. The in-betweens.
I always divided my life into binaries. 0 and 1. War was school, work, deadlines, exams and academics. Peace was home, reading, hangouts (and partying lol). Yale removed that barrier and all hell broke loose. It becomes hard to dichotomize work and life, classmates and friends, friends and family, passions and academics. Tolstoy portrays this masterfully. One chapter is a battlefield and the next is a drawing room, and the same people walk through both. My week functions in a similar way.
November has graced us with gorgeous days of falling red leaves. Campus is at its divine peak. It’s a look you forget to register as magical. Remember the first time you stepped here, how enchanting it felt? And yet I bet that on the walk from HQ to WLH, the words in your head are far from enchanting. Probably “Fuck, I’m late.” Probably a thousand other thoughts racing through your head while you zone out to your autumn playlist. At this point, it’s become quite difficult to romanticize your life. Instead, we catastrophize, melancholize and get nostalgic for the days before midterms and daylight saving.
Prince Andrei, who carries his disillusionment almost everywhere he goes, has the same issue. He drives past an old oak in spring, bare and gnarled, and decides the tree agrees with him that love and happiness are a stupid lie. A few weeks later, he passes it again and almost doesn’t recognize it. It’s covered in fresh leaves, and he starts to wonder whether he gave up on life too early. Unfortunately, Yale’s trees are headed in the opposite direction. Still, there’s always something growing, always some potential for small joys.
Between the wars in class and the wars in your three-hour club meeting (this genuinely could have been an email), you get to have dinner with your friends in rooms that look like Tolstoyan ballrooms. There are late-night G-Heav runs and short Ashley’s breaks from Sterling. A cheeky Thursday night at Heidi’s. A random compliment. A FaceTime with your best friend from home. An end-of-day chat in your dorm with your suitemates.
The problem is we don’t really count any of it. We call it a break, the filler between the things that matter, or even in some cases a waste of time, something indulgent. It adds up anyway, quietly, and shapes your life without you realizing.
Nobody lives in the in-betweens harder than my close personal friend, Natasha Rostova. She enters the book at thirteen, bursting into a drawing room full of adults with a doll in her hands, laughing at nothing. At Otradnoe, the family’s country estate, she leans out a window at night, too happy to sleep, wanting to hug her knees and fly away. At her uncle’s house after a hunt, she dances a Russian folk dance nobody ever taught her and somehow knows exactly what to do. She loves too fast, makes terrible decisions with total conviction and feels everything at full volume. She is intense. Reading her, I felt less alone in being an intense person too. None of her best moments move the plot. All of them stayed with me. They kept me company, they inspired me, they were friends to me.
What makes the book hit isn’t the elaborate battles or the big rooms. Whether you’re an aristocrat from two hundred years ago, a fictional character or a person walking through campus right now, emotions are diachronic. We have all been heartbroken like Natasha, even if we’ve never been sick in bed because the man we were ready to run away with turned out to be married and cost us our engagement. We have all fallen from grace like Andrei, even if we’ve never been flat on our backs at Austerlitz, realizing the glory we wanted and the man we wanted to impress were small all along. We have all been lost like Pierre, asking what any of it is for, even if we aren’t rich and married and haven’t tried a duel and a secret society to fix our lives. In this book and at Yale and in this life, we have all been Natashas and Pierres and Andreis.
We are all connected diachronically through our emotions, through how our battles, our wars, our peaces and our dances make us feel. That is our common language.
And to get through them, we’ve just got to acknowledge them, and take the piss together.
